Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann: The Critic Who Invented Two Selves

In 1838 a manuscript was gathering dust in the Vienna apartment of Ferdinand Schubert. Robert Schumann talked his way in, recognised what he was holding, and arranged for Mendelssohn to premiere Schubert's Great C major Symphony in Leipzig the following March. He described the piece with a phrase that has stuck to it ever since: "heavenly length." It was a characteristic act. Schumann's ear for other people's greatness was as sharp as his own invention, and he spent his life refusing to choose between the two.

A Bookseller's Son in Zwickau

He was born on 8 June 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, the fifth and last child of August Schumann — bookseller, lexicographer, and publisher of chivalric romances, who made a substantial living issuing German translations of Cervantes, Walter Scott and Byron. The house was full of print, and Robert read voraciously at the Zwickau Lyceum, favouring Schiller and Jean Paul. He was no Mozart: piano lessons with the organist Johann Gottfried Kuntsch began at seven, alongside cello and flute, but nobody paraded him as a prodigy. When August died in 1826 his mother steered him toward law, and in 1828 he enrolled at Leipzig University, transferring to Heidelberg the following year. He diagnosed the conflict himself in a letter home: "My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose, or call it music and law."

The Hand That Closed One Door

From 1829 he studied piano with Friedrich Wieck, Leipzig's leading teacher. Then his right hand began to fail — a growing paralysis in at least one finger. The cause has never been settled; the candidates include a mechanical practice device called the chiroplast, mercury poisoning, and focal dystonia. He tried allopathy, homeopathy and electric therapy. Nothing worked. By 1832 he accepted that a virtuoso career was closed and turned to composition, which proved to be the most productive injury in nineteenth-century music.

Florestan, Eusebius and the New Journal

His Opus 1, the Abegg Variations of 1830, built its theme from a musical cryptogram spelling a name; Papillons followed in 1832. Around the same time he split himself in two on paper. Florestan was impetuous and combative, Eusebius inward and dreaming. They were not a gimmick — they argued in his criticism and alternated inside his piano cycles.

In March 1834 he joined the editorial board of the Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik; by January 1835 he was sole editor of what became the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The Library of Congress credits him with elevating music criticism "to an artful pursuit," publishing hundreds of essays and reviews on Berlioz, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Beethoven and Liszt in the nine years before he sold the journal in 1843. His entire creative life, the Library notes, was "guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature."

The piano works of that decade remain his most secure achievement: Carnaval (1835), whose notes encode the name of the town of Asch; the Symphonic Studies of the same year; Kreisleriana and the Davidsbündlertänze in 1837; Kinderszenen in 1838.

The Four-Year War for Clara Wieck

Clara Wieck was Friedrich's daughter and already a virtuoso, having debuted at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1828 with Mendelssohn conducting. She and Schumann declared their love in January 1836. Wieck fought the match with everything available to him, convinced that Schumann could not support her and that marriage would cost her both her career and her inheritance. Four years of acrimonious litigation followed before a court granted permission to marry without the father's consent. They wed on 12 September 1840, the day before Clara turned twenty-one.

The Year of Song

The marriage detonated something. In 1840 alone Schumann wrote more than half the songs of his life: Myrthen, twenty-six settings given to Clara as a wedding present; Frauenliebe und Leben on poems of Chamisso; the Eichendorff and Heine Liederkreise; and Dichterliebe, sixteen Heine settings that remain the central German song cycle after Schubert. Orchestral music followed fast — the Spring Symphony premiered at the Gewandhaus on 31 March 1841 under Mendelssohn — then a chamber year in 1842 that produced three string quartets, the Piano Quintet Op. 44 and the Piano Quartet. The Piano Concerto, completed in 1845 out of an 1841 fantasy, became one of the most played of all Romantic concertos.

Düsseldorf and the Rhine

He taught at Mendelssohn's new Leipzig Conservatory from 1843, toured Russia with Clara in 1844, and moved the family to Dresden that December. A severe mental crisis in early 1843 was, by his own account, not the first, and the affliction may have been congenital — his father and his sister Emilie appear to have shared it. His opera Genoveva reached the stage in Leipzig in June 1850 and failed; the critic Eric Frederick Jensen's verdict is that it was "not tuneful and simplistic enough for the majority, not 'progressive' enough for the Wagnerians."

With seven children to feed he took the music directorship at Düsseldorf in April 1850 and produced the five-movement Rhenish Symphony and the Cello Concerto within months. But his diffidence in company, compounded by instability, wore down the goodwill of the local musicians until his removal in 1853 became a necessity. That same year the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms knocked at his door with a letter from the violinist Joseph Joachim, played his first piano sonata, and sent Schumann rushing from the room to fetch Clara by the hand. Schumann's final article for his old journal, "Neue Bahnen," announced Brahms to Europe.

On 27 February 1854 Schumann threw himself into the Rhine and was pulled out by fishermen. At his own request he entered the sanatorium at Endenich near Bonn on 4 March. The director barred contact between patients and relatives; Clara did not see her husband again until two days before the end, nearly two and a half years later. Brahms and Joachim were admitted. He died there on 29 July 1856, aged forty-six, officially of pneumonia.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is the compression of literature into music. Schumann's stated ambition, as the Library of Congress frames it, was to give music the intellectual substance of literature, and the piano cycles are the evidence. Carnaval and Kreisleriana are not suites of pieces but arguments between characters, keyed to ciphers, moving in fragments that cohere only at the level of the whole — a structural idea nobody had pushed that far. Baker's Biographical Dictionary calls him a "great German composer of surpassing imaginative power whose music expressed the deepest spirit of the Romantic era," and particular listeners have used the language of awe: Tchaikovsky called Das Paradies und die Peri "a divine work" and said he knew "nothing higher in all of music"; Elgar called Schumann "my ideal."

The counter-case is real and was made in his own century. Felix Draeseke's line — "Schumann started as a genius and ended as a talent" — condensed a durable mid-twentieth-century view that everything after the mid-1840s thinned out, whether from failing health or growing orthodoxy. His orchestral and operatic music drew mixed notices from the premieres onward, and Genoveva has never come near the repertory. Only the solo piano music commands near-universal agreement on its quality. Recent decades have pushed back, with Heinz Holliger complaining that "a pious veil of silence obscures the more sober, austere and concentrated works of the late period," but the honest summary is that Schumann's claim rests overwhelmingly on one decade of keyboard music and a single year of song, not on an even career.

Legacy

The influence ran wide and fast: Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg and Wolfgang Rihm in Germany; Bizet, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel in France; Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky in Russia. Grieg modelled his Piano Concerto on Schumann's and argued that the songs deserved recognition as major contributions to world literature. Brahms, whom Schumann discovered in his last lucid year, joked that he had learned only chess from him — a debt disguised as a deflection.

Achievements

• Notable work: Symphony No. 1
• Notable work: Symphony No. 2
• Notable work: Symphony No. 3
• Notable work: Kinderszenen
• Instruments: piano